Summary: Who is accountable for the accuracy of stories told in a world where the voices delivering them are most likely from people we have never met, who are financially motivated to encourage us to think and believe certain things? Who will face the consequences if information about life experiences gathered in this way turns out to be wrong? When do we know what is said is true, and what we can apply to the way we live? The people we call Stakeholder Leaders, at Birth2Work, walk this line every day. They are the new community leaders who cherish wisdom and tradition, but recognize that new stories are needed to push ourselves forward into the future. Today’s interview with Brian Dyak, President, CEO and Co-Founder of the Entertainment Industries Council (EIC), confronted these exact questions with the way mental health and addiction issues were being portrayed in the public media more than 25 years ago as a community health worker. Out of his caring and his passion for truth, he formed the EIC, to do something proactive about the volumes of misinformation being fed to the public, making his job a lot harder. He slowly began to garner the trust of writers, directors, and producers in the established entertainment industry, who began turning to the EIC for access to technical medical and social services professionals who were specially selected and readily available to provide specialized technical information on social and health issues such as mental health, drug addiction, and gun violence to entertainment writers and professionals. “Accuracy in depiction,” as it is called in EIC shorthand, has become more and more important because a growing audience doesn’t necessarily mean a growing media literate audience that’s able to tell if the “fictional” stories they are watching are based on facts they can trust and rely on in their personal lives. No one ever told audiences that they should be able to rely on the stories from TV and in movies for truth and accuracy, but they do. You don’t think so? I am not just talking about the rise in (self-diagnosed) diseases by viewers of daytime soap operas. Consider the study that was just completed by Dr. Peter Brindley, a critical-care specialist at the University of Alberta Hospital, and his colleague Dr. Craig Needham. The two decided to investigate the question of how Emmy-winning medical dramas, such as “ER”, have been giving medical students the wrong ideas of what life is really like in the emergency room while they looking for the best ways to teach resuscitation methods to students. From the Canadian Television report on the study- “Knowing that pre-conceived ideas about medicine can influence students even after they get accepted into med school, the pair decided to survey 80 medical students and residents about their attitudes. They were particularly interested in knowing how the students had learned to intubate patients, which involves carefully inserting a tube down the windpipe. What started out as a somewhat trivial exploration into the minds of students uncovered some surprises. ‘We asked medical students 'Where did you get some of your ideas before you even came into the medical profession?' And interestingly enough, 'ER’ came up as the number one influence,’ Brindley told Canada AM.” “It is harder to unlearn than it is to learn.” –Glen Doman, the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential Clearly we are not talking about the “uneducated,” or children, or any of the other stereotypes of human subcategories that “educated” people claim they are smarter than. No, we’re talking about the medical students who are now in school, learning to save our lives and care for us in our most vulnerable states… and they have all been watching “ER” and shows like it since they were those afore mentioned, easily impressionable children. An entire generation has learned to take care of the rest of us by watching TV. Consider
